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September 27, 2024
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End UC’s two-tier care system: A Behavioral Health Equity Town Hall

Faculty may be interested in attending this event:

Join UPTE clinical social workers and San Francisco Supervisor Aaron Peskin to demand UCSF Health end its unfair two-tier care system. Our critical work for the most vulnerable is devalued. UC must immediately address systemic inequities in behavioral health care.

October 3, 2024, 4 – 5 pm
San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center
Building 3, Carr Auditorium, first floor
1001 Potrero Ave, San Francisco, CA 94110
(Doors open at 3:30 pm)

RSVP at https://upte.org/townhall

Special Guest Aaron Peskin is San Francisco Supervisor, District 3, a 2024 San Francisco mayoral candidate, and President of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

Juliette Suarez, Clinical Social Worker 2, UCSF Trauma Recovery Center and UPTE Unit Representative explained: “UCSF operates a two-tier system where pay and resources depend on how profitable the patients are. My colleagues and me, who care for some of San Francisco’s most vulnerable, are paid 31% less than our social work counterparts at UCSF medical centers. This pay disparity discourages skilled clinicians from working with high-risk populations, leading to burnout, understaffing, and longer client wait times. UC’s decision not to invest in our services directly impacts our patients’ quality of care.”

July 5, 2024
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Proposed revision to APM-016

UC proposes adding a section to the Academic Personnel Manual’s section on Faculty Conduct and the Administration of Discipline (APM-016). Specifically, a pause on the merit and promotion process is proposed when there is even an uninvestigated allegation of misconduct. Such a pause could be easily abused to the detriment of faculty as it removes the presumption of innocence and risks indefinitely delaying merit and promotion cases.

Several faculty members, including Walter Leal (Molecular & Cellular Biology, UC Davis), have written a powerful letter opposing this amendment and are collecting signatures from faculty before delivering the letter to UC’s Vice Provost of Academic Personnel and Programs during the proposal comment period, which ends on July 8.

We highly recommend that, if you have not done so already (hundreds of faculty members have already signed on), you take a look at the letter and consider signing on yourself:

https://forms.gle/acCfaAEE8qUEd6Da6

Please note that you must scroll all the way down, past the many signatures, and click the “Next” button in order to add your signature.

Sincerely,
The Board of the UCSF Faculty Association

March 15, 2024
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We Support Board of Admissions Math Recommendation

Dear UC Regents’ Chair Leib,

We are alarmed that the Regents have recently chosen to ignore the recommendations of the Academic Council and its systemwide Senate committees on a number of key issues. The centrality of faculty governance to the University of California is critical to maintaining its international reputation for excellence and recruiting the best scholars and teachers. It is especially concerning that the Regents have overruled their own faculty in educational matters–like admission standards, curricula questions, and academic freedom–over which faculty have greater expertise. While we consider harmful all the examples of the Regents’ interference in Senate faculty’s delegated authority and the principles of shared governance, here we are writing to address the most recent instance of the Regents substituting their wishes for the expertise of the faculty.

At your recent meetings, the Regents rejected the Academic Council’s recommendations regarding online education and testing requirements for admission. At your upcoming meeting on 20 March, two items are on your agenda where Senate committees have decisively rejected the proposals under discussion—namely, banning political statements on websites and the mathematics requirement for admission. As we have already written to you about the former, we focus here on the latter.

Academic Senate Regulations for at least the last 40 years have required freshman applicants for undergraduate admission to learn the contents of Algebra I, Geometry, and Algebra II to be eligible. Those regulations are still in effect to this day. Senate Regulation 428.C allows students to skip a required course for admission if they take a more advanced one that “assumes knowledge acquired” from the skipped course. Under this exception clause, several curricula self-labeled as “data science” were approved by the UCOP High School Articulation Unit as substituting for the Algebra II requirement in senate regulations.

However, it has become abundantly clear that several of these “data science,” and even some statistics, courses do not actually satisfy Senate Regulation 428.C since they do not “assume knowledge acquired” from Algebra II. This has been repeatedly examined and concluded by multiple parties, including by the majority of Black senate faculty across the University of California system in a letter from May 2022 concerned with equity issues (of students from underrepresented groups being funneled into courses that underprepare them), by the Systemwide Academic Preparation and Education Programs Committee of California State University in this resolution approved in March 2023 by BOARS in a unanimous July 2023 vote, and most recently in a report released by a systemwide Area C workgroup that spent an entire semester researching the matter and stated in February 2024 it “strongly supports the July 2023 BOARS decision that the three courses above do not validate Algebra II according to current Senate Regulations.” The workgroup even went further to state, “We find these current courses labeled as ‘data science’ are more akin to data literacy courses. While they may be suitable college preparatory courses for some students, they are not appropriate as recommended 4th year Mathematics courses per SR 424.” Lastly, even beyond the CSU and UC systems, industry leaders from companies such as OpenAI, Google, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and many others have applauded the recommendation of the workgroup, affirming the importance of strong mathematical foundations for future jobs in artificial intelligence.

Regents Policy 2102 and Regents Bylaw 40.1 state that the Academic Senate is responsible for determining conditions for admission, subject to approval by the Board of Regents. Though the Board has the ultimate authority to approve or disapprove Senate recommendations, it is difficult to understand why they would do so on this question of admission standards, on which they have little expertise.

We urge the Board to listen to its world-class faculty and adopt BOARS’ recommendation regarding the validation of Algebra II based on the work of the Area C workgroup.

Sincerely,

Constance Penley, CUCFA President and Professor of Film and Media Studies UC Santa Barbara

On behalf of the Council of UC Faculty Associations

February 12, 2024
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Objection to Regents’ Proposed New Website Policy

Below is the letter the Council of University of California Faculty Associations sent on February 12 to the UC Regents objecting to their proposed new website policy.

Dear UC Regents,

At its meeting on January 24, the Regents proposed a new policy on the use of university administrative websites. The central aim of this Action Item J3 was to prevent schools, departments, centers and other academic units from using their websites to publicly express “the personal or collective opinions” of the faculty in case that is mistaken to represent the University’s official position. We applaud the Regents for deferring further discussion of this proposal to their next meeting, as this will enable them to consult with faculty leaders and experts in the field who consider it both an unnecessary and dangerous measure.

As documented in a report from the systemwide Senate Academic Council and its Committee on Academic Freedom, University policy “permits departments to make statements on University-owned websites, as long as those statements do not take stands on electoral politics.” UCAF explains that while the University is prohibited from taking positions on the outcomes of elections, it is not prohibited from making other political statements (and indeed often does so). The Senate Academic Council has “endorse[d] the overriding principle…that departments should not be precluded from issuing or endorsing statements in the name of the department,” noting that “freedom of expression and academic freedom are core tenets of the UC educational mission, and individual faculty members and groups of faculty have a right to speak publicly about political or controversial issues.”

CUCFA agrees with UCAF and the Academic Council that existing policy already protects the University from any legal liability and that this additional restriction is both unnecessary and dangerous. At a time when free speech and academic freedom are under threat on many campuses, the proposed policy is recklessly ambiguous. The Regents are still debating whether the new policy will apply to all websites or solely to the landing pages of department websites, and that is a huge policy difference. In failing to adequately define what constitutes a political statement, it runs the risk of serious overreach and abuse. This is all the more alarming as the policy does not specify who is responsible for its enforcement: which university office or position will be responsible for policing the policy? At their next meeting, we urge the Regents to reject this dangerously ambiguous policy as it threatens to violate the principles of faculty governance and academic freedom central to the University of California.

Sincerely,
Constance Penley, CUCFA President and Professor of Film and Media Studies, UC Santa Barbara
Wendy Matsumura, CUCFA Vice President and Associate Professor of History, UC San Diego

On behalf of the Council of UC Faculty Associations

January 30, 2024
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FA Letter: UCSF Should Not Attack Their Own Faculty

January 30, 2024

Dear President Drake, UC Regents, Chancellor Hawgood, Provost Lucey, Dean King, and Chair Wachter,

The Council of UC Faculty Associations (CUCFA) is an umbrella organization for the Faculty Associations at each of the ten UC campuses, which advocates for the economic and employment conditions of UC faculty and faculty rights of academic freedom and political speech. We reiterate our deep alarm at the chilling climate across the United States, and on UC campuses that undermines the academic freedom and the free speech rights of instructional faculty, staff, and students to express support for the Palestinian people and/or criticize the Israeli government in any terms consistent with academic freedom, including settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.

We write today to condemn the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)’s misleading and viciously-worded attack on their own faculty member Dr. Rupa Marya, a professor of medicine and internationally renowned expert on antiracism, health equity, and the health impacts of colonialism. Dr. Marya’s supposedly “racist conspiracy theory” was a critique of Israel’s destruction of the healthcare system in Gaza, and was a call to study the impacts of this destruction on the Palestinian people (see Dr. Marya’s personal statement giving context to her Tweet and the response to it). UCSF’s appalling actions, outlined in a petition written by her colleagues, “Protect Academic Freedom and Freedom of Speech at UCSF,” have exacerbated the harassment that Dr. Marya had been on the receiving end of since California Senator Scott Wiener reposted a post critical of Dr. Marya and accused her of antisemitism. Hundreds of people reposted Wiener’s post and tagged Canary Mission. As a result, Marya was doxxed and received multiple death threats. It is unconscionable that following these attacks, UCSF did not condemn Wiener and Canary Mission, but rather used its own social media accounts to share its own defamatory statement, which rapidly spread across multiple social media platforms. These attacks by UCSF leadership against a respected member of the community for their antiracist and decolonial post send a chilling message to faculty, students, staff, patients, and community members. It also obstructs faculty members’ right to academic freedom and all community members’ constitutional right to freedom of speech.

We call for an immediate retraction of your defamatory statement and a public reaffirmation of UCSF’s commitment to free speech that safeguards academic freedom. It is fully within Dr. Marya’s rights to express any political position on a post and to share her academic work. CUCFA condemns UCSF’s institutional response that mobilized an antisemitic trope like that of the “conspiracy theory” levied against her. We demand an end to the “Palestine Exception” to academic freedom and free speech. UC System Provost, Katherine S. Newman’s statement, “We count on the disciplinary expertise of our faculty to develop the methods, substantive scholarly work, peer review, and vigorous debate that makes universities such an essential resource for evaluating difficult and contentious issues of contemporary and historical importance” must apply to all.

Finally, in light of the upcoming Board of Regents meeting where the Regents will deliberate their disciplinary powers over faculty (now apparently planned to occur at the March meeting), an issue CUCFA views as an unprecedented and alarming threat to UC’s educational mission. We remind you that shared governance implies that the Academic Senate, notably Privilege and Tenure, have purview over disciplinary processes. Laid out in the Senate bylaws and APM 15, faculty control over faculty disciplinary processes is fundamental to the conditions of our employment and is thus a core CUCFA issue.

Sincerely,

Constance Penley, CUCFA President and Professor of Film and Media Studies, UC Santa Barbara
Wendy Matsumura, CUCFA Vice President and Associate Professor of History, UC San Diego

On behalf of the Council of UC Faculty Associations

November 14, 2023
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UC Union Coalition Letter on Health Plan Cost Increases

On November 14th, the Council of UC Faculty Associations signed on to the following UC Union Coalition letter that was sent to the UC Regents and copied to President Drake. A PDF of the letter is also available.

Dear Regents of the University of California:

The University of California Union Coalition demands that the Regents take action to mitigate the massive increases to the healthcare costs of our members planned for the coming year. Workers across the state are facing premium increases of more than 20 percent in most cases. For some, these increases will nearly triple their monthly costs. When healthcare premiums already cost hundreds of dollars per month, the massive increases that the Regents are moving forward with will cause real and lasting harm to many California families.

The University has acknowledged in an October 16th memo that it “…will continue to assess medical plan premiums by pay level to ensure costs are affordable, particularly for lower-paid workers.” While the sentiment is appreciated, the proposed increases fail to adequately translate it into practice. The lowest-paid workers in the UC system do not have the luxury of simply absorbing an increase of this magnitude. Many of the members of the unions in the UC community represent workers who do not get full-time contracts or adequate hours. The increases on the table mean that many of our most marginalized workers will have to make choices between adequate healthcare, rent payments, and other basic necessities.

Moreover, the policy needs to be considered seriously in terms of its disparate impact on the diverse groups who constitute our community. The damage done by the university’s decision falls most heavily on historically disadvantaged groups. For example, immigrants and people of color are overrepresented in the ranks of our community’s lowest-earning members. Similarly, there is a large pay discrepancy between men and women across the UC system. To give just one example, there is a major underrepresentation of women in ladder faculty positions, and a corresponding overrepresentation of women in contingent lecturer positions. This means that the effects of the increase will be inevitably gendered. The Regents have both an ethical and policy-mandated responsibility to promote equality in the UC system, and this decision is going to further exacerbate the major inequities that many of our members face every day.

We believe that there is also a conflict of interest in how the university has negotiated the rate increases with the providers in its own system. Given that two of the major plans available to UC employees are based on the UC hospital system, the Regents should have invited a third party to participate in the negotiations over the plan cost increases. The only group getting a good deal here are the administrators of the hospital systems.

Many of our members have told us how this policy would affect their families. One member writes: “My family and I are already barely scraping by, due to expensive cost of living and inflation. We will be forced to cut back on medical expenses, leaving some issues untreated and hoping they don’t get worse.” We are certain that the UC does not want to see its members forgo necessary healthcare. Any policy that forces workers to simply live with untreated conditions is of course cruel. At the same time, policies like this are part of the very reason that healthcare costs continue to rise. Instead of getting care when they need it, employees with poor quality, limited access, high co-pay insurance causes people to wait until they face a medical crisis to get treated. This is inevitably much more expensive to everyone involved than simply providing good quality, affordable healthcare that heads off issues before they become emergencies. The UC Regents should commit themselves to being part of the solution rather than the problem.

In conclusion, we demand that the UC Regents stop passing on cost increases to employees. We demand union involvement in healthcare plan negotiations. And we also need transparency regarding the negotiations between the University and its own health systems to protect from self-dealing.

Sincerely,
Michael Avant, President
AFSCME Local 3299

Stephanie Short, Asst. Director, UC Division
CNA/NNU

Constance Penley, President
Council of UC Faculty Associations (CUCFA)

Jason Rabinowitz, Secretary-Treasurer
Teamsters Local 2010

Rafael Jaime, President
UAW Local 2685

Neal Sweeney, President
UAW Local 5810

Katie Rodger, Ph.D., President
UC-American Federation of Teachers (AFT)

Dan Russell, President
UPTE-CWA Local 9119

cc: UC President Michael Drake

October 30, 2023
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Our letter objecting to unreasonable increases in health benefit costs

Below is a letter to UC President Michael Drake and the UC Regents objecting to healthcare benefit costs to employees increasing by 15% to 193%, depending on plan and coverage, that CUCFA sent on October 30th. The Faculty Associations collected 1,600 signatures for a second edition of this letter, which was sent to President Drake and the UC Regents on November 12th.

October 30, 2023

President Michael V. Drake
Office of the President
University of California
1111 Franklin St., 12th Floor
Oakland, CA 94607

Delivered via Email to: president@ucop.edu

Dear President Drake,

Starting today, every UC employee received an Open Enrollment notice with new rates for healthcare benefits. UCOP presented these changes to UC Unions and the Council of UC Faculty Associations just three days before the start of Open Enrollment, leaving no opportunity for any input.

The increases in the employee health benefits share are unprecedented and alarming. Costs for healthcare benefits will be going up between 15% and 193% per month, depending on one’s plan and coverage. For example, if you currently pay for Kaiser for yourself and your spouse/partner, your cost will increase by 74% on January 1. Employees who insure themselves and their whole family (spouse/partner + children) through UC Health Savings Plan will see an increase of 171%. Every health benefit plan and coverage tier is affected, and these changes will impact the over 200,000 employees who receive benefits in the UC system.

Struck by the exorbitant increases, the UC unions and CUCFA pressed for answers. UCOP representatives cited inflation, deferred preventative care during the pandemic, rising drug costs, and clinical workforce shortages as root causes for these price increases. While these are all real issues impacting healthcare costs everywhere, when pushed for details about how prices were negotiated and set for UC employees, UCOP’s answers were unsatisfactory and lacked transparency.

For example, the cost to employees is determined by the insurance company rate increase less the employer share contribution. UC did not provide information about either the rate increase or the employer contribution, so there is no way to tell if UC is paying its share of the increased cost. But other sources indicate that Kaiser’s rate increase was probably about 15% this year[1], which would mean that UC reduced its share of contributions by about 20%.

We object to these unreasonable increases in our health benefit costs and UC’s secrecy and nontransparency in devising and announcing these policies. Your approach serves not only to degrade and disrespect UC’s academic employees but also contributes to the ongoing severe erosion of UC’s teaching and research mission. You will be hearing more from CUCFA, the UC unions, and the 200,000 people in the UC community who are now learning about how their lives and livelihoods will be devastated by the poorly warranted policy changes to our healthcare that UCOP has sprung on them.

Sincerely,

Constance Penley
President, The Council of UC Faculty Associations
Professor, Film and Media Studies, UCSB

cc: The UC Regents

February 8, 2021
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Sign to Stop UC from Anti-Reproductive Rights/Anti-LGBTQ+ Affiliations

Pasted below is a message from UCSF Ob/Gyn faculty member Jody Steinauer about UC affiliations with healthcare entities that use religious directives to prohibit the use of contraception, gender-affirming care for transgender people, abortion, and assisted reproductive technology (e.g. sperm/egg donors, IVF).

We feel this issue is an important concern to UCSF faculty, and ask you to consider signing the letter linked below.

********

Dear UC Colleagues and Allies,

I am reaching out as a UCSF Ob/Gyn faculty member who cares deeply about reproductive rights and the care of LGBTQ+ people. Please sign our letter to UC President Michael Drake that expresses opposition to UC affiliations with healthcare entities that use religious directives to prohibit the use of contraception, gender-affirming care for transgender people, abortion, and assisted reproductive technology (e.g. sperm/egg donors, IVF).

I believe religious directives that prohibit essential care for women and LGBTQ+ people are antithetical to our UC values, our public, secular mission, and our commitment to equity, nondiscrimination, and care of the underserved. These restrictive systems of care harm vulnerable populations; UC affiliations with these entities elevate the needs of some patients at the expense of discriminating against others.

In its first eight days, the Biden-Harris administration has issued important executive orders to protect LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights. With this momentum, it is certainly not the time for our California public universities to expand discriminatory care. With a solid conservative majority on the Supreme Court, states will continue to enact policies that restrict access to care, as we have seen with abortion. Therefore, California needs to expand, not restrict, access to the full range of sexual and reproductive healthcare and set an example for high quality care that is consistent with our values.

Please sign the Letter to UC President Drake and forward to other UC faculty, staff, trainees, or alumni. Also, we are not alone in our opposition to these affiliations. Fifty one major advocacy groups for LGBTQ+ people, reproductive health, and health equity/care of the underserved, as well as the majority of California’s federal and state members of Congress have written letters of opposition. Scroll down on the linked page to see their letters.

Thank you for your support,

Jody Steinauer, MD, PhD (she/her/hers)
Philip D. Darney Distinguished Professor of Family Planning & Reproductive Health
Director, Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health
Dept. of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences
Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital
University of California, San Francisco

September 24, 2020
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CUCFA’s letter to UC about the Potential for Censorship of Faculty by Private Technology Providers

September 24, 2020

President Michael V. Drake
Office of the President
University of California
1111 Franklin St., 12th Floor
Oakland, CA 94607

Delivered via Email to: president@ucop.edu

Dear President Drake,

As members of the Board of the Council of UC Faculty Associations, we write with the utmost urgency regarding the cancellation of an approved remote/streaming panel at San Francisco State University yesterday, September 23, by Zoom, and the subsequent cancellation of the same event by Facebook Live and cut-off in mid-stream by YouTube. The event, titled “Whose Narratives: Gender, Justice and Resistance,” was sponsored by SFSU’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies Program and the Women and Gender Studies Department, and was to feature Palestinian feminist and militant Leila Khaled, as well as several South African and American activists.

After protests by several pro-Israel groups, Zoom announced that it was prohibiting the webinar – which was thoroughly vetted and approved by the University – from taking place less than two hours before its commencement. The event was subsequently restricted by Facebook and then, after beginning to be streamed on YouTube, was cut off by the company.

Zoom and the others claimed that Khaled’s membership in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (she is also a member of the Palestine National Council) made her appearance a potential violation of US law. SFSU clearly understood this not to be the case. The relevant Supreme Court decision on this issue, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, which deals with the intersection of the First Amendment and “material support for terrorism” laws, clearly notes that there is no prohibition of being associated with or even a member of an organization, only for providing it with material support of some kind. Moreover, we need not remind you that the First Amendment extends the right not only to speak but also to hear and receive information even when presented by people opposed to the US or its policies.

As SFSU president Lynn Mahoney explained in defending her support of the event, it is imperative that faculty and the university be free from censorship, even from voices that most would find objectionable and even abhorrent: “The university will not enforce silence – even when speech is abhorrent.”

By preemptively canceling this talk, Zoom, Facebook and YouTube – which together represent three of the most important remote platforms used by universities during the Covid-19 pandemic – are engaging in a dangerous precedent of censorship, which will no doubt lead other governments and political groups to demand they cancel other events, classes or content that they oppose. As our colleague Saree Makdisi, professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA, argues, it is a frightening example of “what happens when we subcontract our universities to Zoom.” Simply put, we universities cannot allow Zoom to have a veto power over the content of our lectures and classes.

We thus call upon you to publicly demand that Zoom, Facebook, YouTube (Google/Alphabet) and other increasingly important social media-related educational platforms immediately agree never to cancel or otherwise censor university-related teaching, lectures or other events and, if they refuse, to move immediately towards finding alternative platforms for teaching and lectures that agree to respect our core First Amendment and Academic Freedom rights.

Sincerely,
The Executive Board of the Council of UC Faculty Associations

cc: Chancellor Carol T. Christ
Chancellor Gary Stephen May
Chancellor Howard Gillman
Chancellor Gene D. Block
Chancellor Juan Sánchez Muñoz
Chancellor Kim A Wilcox
Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla
Chancellor Sam Hawgood, MBBS
Chancellor Henry Yang
Chancellor Cynthia Larive

March 14, 2020
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President Napolitano, please extend striking student health insurance for COVID-19

March 14, 2020

Dear President Napolitano,

The Faculty Organizing Group at UCSC has just issued a very important letter to UCSC’s EVC Kletzer (copied below) in which they call for an act of “empathy, compassion, and responsibility” in reinstating the 80 graduate students fired for their participation in the COLA strike, because they are poised to lose their healthcare coverage at a time of the worst health crisis this country has faced in decades.

The Council of UC Faculty Associations endorses this call and addresses it specifically to you as an opportunity to rethink your harsh opposition to the just cause of UC’s graduate students. You know better than anyone how deep and sustained has been the disinvestment of the state in graduate education at the University of California. Take this chance to do the right thing and begin to work to do the just thing as well.

The Executive Board of the Council of UC Faculty Associations

Letter from the Faculty Organizing Group at UC Santa Cruz (This is posted here as it was part of the letter to President Napolitano, but the FOG letter is also available online, with a list of individual signers):

Dear iEVC/CP Kletzer,

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization officially characterized COVID-19 as a pandemic. On March 13, the president declared a national emergency due to COVID-19. We appreciate that the campus is taking this health threat very seriously, as evidenced by its decisions to: (a) hold no in-person classes starting March 11, 2020, except for certain classes, and running through at least April 3; (b) suspend non-essential travel; c) cancel meetings larger than 50 people; and (d) encourage telecommuting as much as possible. We believe that these measures are consistent with an institution facing the vast responsibility of continuing to function while protecting the well-being of all its members in a swiftly changing situation.

At a time when we are likely to see a serious increase in COVID-19 cases in California, it is vital, even necessary, that everyone have access to healthcare. This is especially important in the US, where preparation against COVID-19 has not been as robust as it should have been. We trust that the campus is already considering how to meet the health care needs of our community for the next few months.

The global public health crisis changes the likely consequences of your recent decision to dismiss approximately 80 graduate students from their spring quarter teaching appointments. Since March 9, UCSHIP (the health insurance that covers most of UCSC’s graduate students) has been providing free screening and testing for COVID-19. Graduate students’ access to this health insurance is dependent on their employment at the university, so their termination also effectively terminates their health insurance coverage. To maintain their healthcare in spring quarter, dismissed students either face paying both tuition and health insurance premium out of pocket to retain their student status and healthcare, or taking a leave of absence and still paying $2885.60 for UCSHIP coverage. Because both of these options are prohibitively expensive for most graduate students – especially those who have just lost their income – dismissed students are likely to lose access to any healthcare. Many students, including international students, will have no other option than to return home at a time when travel restrictions may make this impossible. For those students who remain in Santa Cruz without healthcare, their inability to secure timely testing and take appropriate measures endangers the community as a whole.

With COVID-19 bearing down on California and beyond, it seems the worst possible time to leave any members of our UCSC community stranded without access to health care. Instead, it is time for all of us to act with empathy, compassion, and responsibility toward everyone on our campus. Given that healthcare is not yet recognized as a basic human right in this country, we urge you to reconsider your decision. Please reinstate graduate students who received Notices Of Intent to Dismiss for spring quarter so that they can continue to access their healthcare networks. To increase these students’ precarity, on top of the loss of their employment, livelihood, and planned courses of study, is not only dangerous to our community but antithetical to its most basic values. We believe that we can all agree there is a better way forward.

Sincerely,
The Faculty Organizing Group